PM/AM: White Holes Are the New Black Holes

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Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics' morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today.

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Is there a back end to a black hole? Does the stuff that a black hole sucks up go anywhere, or does it only get compressed into a tiny point in space? Some cosmologists now suggest that black holes may spit out the matter that they ingest as they turn into into "white holes." It sounds a lot like an astronomical digestive track.

Although the idea of a white hole is hypothetical, theoretical physicists have proposed a new, speculative model for how black holes may become white. Called "quantum bounce," this mechanism would allow a black hole to switch to a white hole immediately after it's born. However, an observer wouldn't see the transformation until billions or trillions of years later because a black hole's gravity stretches time. It's possible that when we see something like a supernova nowadays, it may instead be coming from a black hole that died billions of years ago.

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It's unclear how anyone would test this, but the new model could help explain how information can get out of a black hole. And it's always nice to have some symmetry in the cosmos — what goes in, must come out.

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